Private branch exchanges (PBXs) are telephone exchanges or switches owned by a private firm, as distinguished from being owned by common carriers or by telephone companies. PBXs are commonly deployed in a variety of different environments, typically where a given business enterprise maintains a large number of individual telephone numbers on behalf of its employees. Other examples of PBX deployments include academic institutions, charities, or the like. Generally speaking, the term “telecommunications customer” refers herein to any of the foregoing examples.
The Emergency service, commonly referred to as “911 service”, may be deployed with PBX systems in the types of environments described above. In this manner, the employees, students, or the like using the telephone numbers deployed behind the PBX may initiate 911 emergency calls from work or school as if they were home.
In these types of environments, the telecommunications customer may be faced with the separate tasks of maintaining the PBX system and maintaining the 911 service. Also, the PBX system and the 911 service may be supported by separate data stores. The telecommunications customer may thus decide to delegate the function of maintaining the PBX system to a telecommunications provider, and to delegate the function of maintaining the 911 database to a 911 database vendor. The 911 services vendor may also be viewed as a subcontractor of the telecommunications provider, without loss of generality.
In the above scenario data management between the telecommunications customer, the telecommunications provider, and the 911 database vendor becomes an ongoing challenge. More particularly, the databases that support the PBX telephone numbers often change due to normal daily operations. Due to these changes, the database that supports the 911 calls may become outdated and inaccurate.
More specifically, PBX environments may be located within a jurisdiction that has deployed emergency services, such as the 911 service. Callers whose communications devices are deployed behind the PBX expect to be able to dial an emergency number (e.g., 9-1-1) and have their address information displayed to emergency services personnel, the same as if they had dialed the emergency number from their homes.
Despite these expectations, there are differences between the PBX environment and a residential environment. For example, an emergency services database may store addresses for particular stations from which emergency calls may originate. For convenience, but not limitation, individual telephone numbers or other communication addresses or identifiers that are deployed behind the PBX are referred to as “stations”. When an emergency call arrives from a given station, the address corresponding to that given station is pulled from the database and presented to emergency services personnel.
In a PBX context, the emergency services database may store a demarcation point between local telephone company facilities and central office facilities as the address for all stations behind the PBX. However, some PBX stations may not be located at this stored demarcation point. For example, in a campus-like deployment, different stations behind the PBX may be located in different geographic locations. In this example, the emergency services database may not store specific locations for all of the stations behind the PBX.
In some cases, the implementation as described above may not meet the needs of some customers. Thus, there is a need to enable customers to store more specific location information in the emergency services database.